Rossini Quotes

Wagner has lovely moments but awful quarters of an hour. ~ Gioachino Rossini

Bach is a colossus of Rhodes, beneath whom all musicians pass and will continue to pass. Mozart is the most beautiful, Rossini the most brilliant, but Bach is the most comprehensive: he has said all there is to say. ~ Charles Gounod

Beethoven I take twice a week, Haydn four times, and Mozart every day. ~ Gioachino Rossini

On Rossini's 'The Barber of Seville' - "Much has been written about the fiasco of the opera's first night on 20 February 1816, most of it true: the mockery of Rossini's Spanish-style hazel jacket, the rowdy animosity of the Paisiello lobby, the jeering and the catcalls, as one mishap succeeded another. Basilio sang his 'Calumny' aria with a bloodied nose after tripping over a trap door; then during the act 1 finale, a cat wandered onstage, declined to leave, and was forcibly flung into the wings. According to the Rosina, Gertrude Righetti Giorgi, Rossini left the theatre 'as though he had been an indifferent onlooker'... The second performance was a triumph, though Rossini was not there to witness it. He spent the evening pacing his room, imagining the opera's progress scene by scene. He retired early, only to be roused by a glow of torches and uproar in the street. Fearing that a mob was about to set fire to the building, he took refuge in a stable block. Garcia tried to summon him to acknowledge the adulation. 'F***' their bravos!' was Rossini's blunt rejoinder. 'I'm not coming out'. ~ Richard Osborne

One can't judge Wagner's opera Lohengrin after a first hearing, and I certainly don't intend to hear it a second time. ~ Gioachino Rossini

Music is a kind of harmonious language. ~ Gioachino Rossini

In 1829 Rossini was at an age which has often proven critical in the lives of musicians, painters and writers. Lapses into silence far more complete than Rossini's, creative failures, suicides, and unanticipated deaths have been common in the middle to late 30s. As Charles Rosen has noted, 'It is the age when the most fluent composer begins to lose the ease of inspiration he once possessed, when even Mozart had to make sketches and to revise'. ~ Richard Osborne

Against a heart inflamed with love,
burning with unquenchable fire,
a ruthless tyrant, cruelly armed,
wages war, but all in vain.
From every attack a victor,
Love will always triumph.

- Rosina ~ Gioachino Rossini

Eh, my dear fellow, order is wealth ~ Gioachino Rossini

Answer them critics with silence and indifference. It works better, I assure you, than anger and argument ... ~ Gioachino Rossini

The first characteristic of Rossini's music is speed - a speed which removes from the soul all the sombre emotions that are so powerfully evoked within us by the slow strains in Mozart. I find also in Rossini a cool freshness, which, measure by measure, makes us smile with delight. ~ Stendhal

How wonderful opera would be if there were no singers. ~ Gioachino Rossini

If Beethoven is a prodigy of man, Bach is a miracle of God. ~ Gioachino Rossini

Opera once was an important social instrument - especially in Italy. With Rossini and Verdi, people were listening to opera together and having the same catharsis with the same story, the same moral dilemmas. They were holding hands in the darkness. That has gone. Now perhaps they are holding hands watching television. ~ Luciano Berio

Eating, loving, singing, and digesting are, in truth, the four acts of the comic opera known as life, and they pass like bubbles of a bottle of champagne. Whoever lets them break without having enjoyed them is a complete fool. ~ Gioachino Rossini

Rossini would have been a great composer if his teacher had spanked him enough on his backside. ~ Ludwig Van Beethoven

It's a dream come true, and with this music, with this Rossini, it's unbelievable how to express the joy and express the joy of the situation and the joy to play this music, to sing this music, it's really fantastic. ~ Cecilia Bartoli

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is the only musician who had as much knowledge asgenius, and as much genius as knowledge. ~ Gioachino Rossini

If he had been able to, Barbaja would have put me in charge of the kitchen as well' (Rossini on his impresario ~ Gioachino Rossini